


Seven Years Later

by 09cityskylights



Series: The Manifesto of Mickey Milkovich [3]
Category: Shameless (US), gallavich - Fandom
Genre: Epilogue, M/M, Mexico, Seven Years Later, Speeches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-21 00:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11932869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/09cityskylights/pseuds/09cityskylights
Summary: Epilogue for the Manifesto of Mickey Milkovich series.Seven years after Ian left Mickey at the border, seven years after he struggled to make a new life for himself in Mexico. Continuing from Mickey's point of view, and inspired by two other people which I credit in the end notes.“Every year, I have two weeks of vacation, and every year I come to fucking Mexico! And I show your picture to everyone I meet. Do you know this man? Have you ever seen him before?" - Ian





	Seven Years Later

“Do you regret it?”

“What?”

“I don’t know”. His voice is shaking and he hates it. “Everything”.

Ian looks up at him with guilt layering his green eyes, the Texas dust swirling around him.

In Mickey’s dreamscape, the setting never changes. When he dreams of Ian, he’s never in Mexico with him. He’s always right here, right where they said goodbye.

Ian doesn’t say anything.

Mickey’s cheeks get hot, “Fucking forget it-“ he starts to blurt, but Ian interrupts him, “Just because we didn’t work out… doesn’t mean you weren’t the best thing that ever happened to me. Because you were”.

“Yeah” Mickey finally manages to get out, his blue eyes glistening with tears. “You too”.

He wakes up in a cold sweat, his thin white sheets wrapped and twisted so tightly around himself that they trap him for a moment, until he swears and thrashes out of their hold. “Fuck” he mutters, pressing a hand to his forehead.

Seven years. Seven years and the dreams never stopped appearing out of the blue, fucking with him for weeks afterwards. In his dreams, Ian tells him everything he wants to hear.

Everything he knows isn’t true when he wakes up.

Once, just once, Mickey had used a stolen laptop to look Ian up on Facebook, desperate to try and get some information, any information on him, after a year apart. What he found made sour bile rise in throat.

Ian had gone right back home to his boyfriend, like none of it had ever happened. Like they had never happened.

When a sick need to understand came over him, and he clicked on the guy tagged in Ian’s profile picture, he found a ton of stuff about LGBTQ activism…trans stuff…and he realized, he didn’t know who Ian was anymore.

Ian, his Ian, never cared about labels like that. He was who he fucking was, unapologetically.

Mickey ended up breaking the laptop clean in half.

His first year in Mexico up until that point had been rocky at first, but he quickly ended up figuring out a way to survive. He had never left Punta Monterrey, but it hadn’t been all sandals and tequila either. Not for him anyways.

After hitchhiking his way towards the heavily populated Punta Monterrey resorts he knew his ride had taken off towards, and then after a few days of wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what the fuck to do, he recognized the white van in a parking lot by it’s broken license plate, and waited by it until Juan Manuel showed up.

He seemed surprised to see Mickey there. Surprised to see him alive, and looking determined. Mickey couldn’t help it. He was like a stupid kid again, sure Ian would come back, just like he used to be sure that Santa was a real fucking guy who would actually bring him a present some year.

With the help of a rough English to Spanish manual he had nicked, Mickey managed to get out, “job” “need” and “me”.

Juan Manuel let him stick around until an English-speaking friend showed up, and then they brought him to another group of men based directly out of Punta Monterrey, whereas they were planning to head back to the larger city and then back to San Nicolas de los Garza.

Mickey got lucky. The Punta Monterrey men saw him as a golden opportunity. Whereas they often struggled to get their dealers into the wealthy resorts because the owners were suspicious as fuck of the Mexican natives there, he was white.

Plain and simple, once they put him in some nicer clothes, he looked just like any other tourist with a pocket full of cash. Mickey bounced from resort to resort, staying in their cheapest rooms and selling cocaine, weed, heroin and methamphetines to the “other tourists” for a few weeks before he’d move on to the next one.

When Antonio ran out of resorts for him to visit as a tourist, he got an actual job at one as a maintenance worker, because it kept him closer to the customer base permanently. It was a decent living. He got to enjoy the beautiful sights of the resorts, even though his room was pretty shitty, and once a week he would leave to restock and give the smaller cartel he now worked for their money. His cut kept him well supplied with smokes and booze, the only thing the resort didn’t provide for their live-in employees.

He waited a few months before he fucked anyone else.

Drunk and horny, he ended up hooking up with one of the resorts obviously gay visitors. He wasn’t gonna be fucking celibate while he waited, but he wasn’t looking for some tropical romance bullshit either. He’d fuck a guest, and when they were gone, they were gone. He never had to see them again.

After that first year, when he realized Ian wasn’t going to come back, he spiralled a bit again but eventually kept up his routine. He slowly, surprisingly, started to tan a bit, and from time to time he let his facial hair grown into a beard before he’d shave it all off again.

He told himself he wasn’t waiting for shit, but he still never fucked anyone that would be in Mexico for more than a week or two, because there wasn’t anyone else he wanted to be with. He could admit that much to himself.

And now, well into his seventh and lonely year in Mexico after another night spent with his painful recurring dream, he heads back down to that private beach where he almost ended it all. Not to think about suicidal shit or anything again, but just to think. He always came here after those dreams.

This is where his freedom was supposed to be, he thinks, absentmindedly digging his feet into the warm sand while he smokes. Constant sunshine and beaches, oceans that looked like they went on forever.

So why did it still feel like prison?

The sun is high in the sky now, and squinting upwards at it, he knows he has to get back to the resort before his fucking supervisor goes looking for him to find out why he’s not “maintaining the premises”. Sure enough, while he’s hunched down beside a busted golf cart some fatass staying at the resort managed to break, Marco approaches him.

“I’m not fuckin late” Mickey immediately points out, tired of being accosted for this shit. Marco shakes his head, “Not late. Someone looking for you”.

“Yeah well, I’m busy” Mickey mutters, unrolling a jumper cable. Antonio could fucking wait. He’s the only one that comes looking for him, and frankly, Mickey was getting tired of his shitty cut anyways. Antonio made a killing off him being here, but now that he actually had a job here, continuing to work for the cartel was pretty much just a favor to the asshole.

Marco leaves with a shrug and Mickey continues to swear over the broken golf cart, finally grunting in relief when he reconnects the wires and gets the engine running again. He takes the golf cart keys and heads off to the front desk to drop them off with Martha, the cunt in charge of rentals.

“Someone is looking for you” she says, barely glancing up from her computer when he jingles the keys at her. “Yeah, yeah” Mickey mutters, heading out the front doors.

He’s gonna give Antonio shit for his idiocy this time, he’s gotta stop coming around his work and attracting attention to himself like this. He’s a Mexican gangbanger, hovering by the entrance of a fancy resort isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

Mickey lights a cigarette as he heads outside, blinking again in the bright sunlight, he decides to take shelter from it’s blinding rays by a palm tree. Forgot his fucking sunglasses again. He glances around with the cigarette in his mouth, looking for Antonio, but the only guy waiting out here is much taller than-

Mickey’s stomach drops viciously in recognition, the feeling hitting him hard enough to almost bring him to his knees. It’s only from behind he can see this guy, but he doesn’t even need to see his face. The red hair is enough, he knows exactly who came looking for him. Practically choking on the cigarette smoke that he accidently inhales too sharply, Mickey stumbles back towards the front doors of the El Star Resort, but he hears someone calling out to him.

He hears his name, not said like everyone else here in Mexico says it, but with years of close familiarity.

He feels frozen, standing there underneath the palm trees as a hand roughly grips his shoulder and spins him around.

There’s tears in Ian’s green eyes, and he’s talking, but he’s not making any sense to Mickey’s ringing ears as he speaks emphatically into his face.

Mickey’s voice is low when he answers, not hearing what he’s saying, not caring. “Go away”.

“W-what?” Ian looks uncertain.

“You aren’t real”.

The words surprise Mickey coming out of his mouth as much as they surprise Ian, but he’s done this too many times.

Dreamed of Ian too many times, and now he’s breached his way into his dreams about his life in Mexico too. This was too fucking much, and it would drive him insane if these dreams took up residence in his nights as well.

“I am real” he insists.

The ‘real’ cracks like Mickey’s words did when he had begged Ian, _“I don’t want your fuckin money, I want you to come with me”._

Mickey shoves him away roughly, growling “Fuck off” as he does, but Ian, still looking painfully frustrated, fucking comes right back and clocks him in the face, hard, to get him to snap out of it.

Mickey immediately falls out of his dreamlike state at the impact, quickly realizing this, all of this, was very real.

“Go fuck yourself Gallagher” passes through his lips almost automatically.

He takes off sprinting towards an employees-only area, blocked off from the rest of the resort, positioned only a dozen metres away but seeming like a good a place as any to seek refuge from the overwhelming sensations threatening to fucking swallow him whole right now. He’s not thinking straight.

Ian, after freezing for a moment, just fucking follows him, stepping easily over the chain barrier, ignoring both the Mexican and English prompts of _employees only_ , and comes at him again, pissed off now.

“Are you _fucking kidding me_? That’s all you’re gonna say to me? Do you have any fucking idea-“

“Do you?” Mickey asks, his voice low as he sits down on a wooden crate beside himself. He might pass out if he tries to stand any longer. His head is swimming, and he feels almost nauseas, his heart is racing so fucking fast at this mind fuck.

Ian starts to shout at him, his face reddening, and at first, Mickey doesn’t hear any of it.

He just looks at him, takes in how he’s changed over the years. His red hair is still cut short but he’s growing facial hair now too, short and dark around his jawline and chin, above his lip too, like a delicate shadow. Mickey’s never seen him like that before. His green eyes seem darker than they used to be, maybe, and there’s a few more worry lines on his face than there was when he was twenty. But other than those things, not much has changed. He’s still tall, firm, solid…he’s still Ian.

Mickey’s blue eyes drift down to Ian’s loose white shirt, and then back up to his face again. He feels stoned, and part of him starts to drift back to the notion that this is all just a dream.

But Ian’s still ranting, pointing and yelling and throwing his hands up, and finally his noise breaks through Mickey’s mental shut down when he lowers his tone, his voice going gravelly.

“They all said you were probably dead, because you just fucking disappeared. No one ever heard from you again. And god, I had to do something about it. So I decided, that I was gonna look for you. I was gonna start right where I lost you”.

Ian’s voice is getting louder now, firmer, angrier, but Mickey is slowly realizing that Ian’s not yelling at him. Not really.

He’s not even fucking angry with him. He’s angry at himself.

So Mickey just lets Ian continue as he struggles to take his presence in, who’s practically trembling during his speech he’s so agitated.

“Every year, I have two weeks of vacation, and every year I come to _fucking_ Mexico! And I show your picture to everyone I meet. _Do you know this man? Have you ever seen him before?_ And they all just, they look at me, and shake their heads and go, I’m sorry. Everyone, so fucking sorry. But I _couldn’t stop_ and… every year I would say to myself, I can’t do this. I’m not doing this. Never again”.

Gritting his teeth together, Ian’s voice breaks again even as he tries to stay strong, the tears glistening in his green eyes as he spews his emotions out into the hot air between them, “But every year I would come back because…because I couldn’t stop. Then a couple days ago, I showed your picture to some gangbanger, and I saw it. In his eyes. He recognized you. He knew you. And when I saw you back there walking away from me…I couldn’t believe it. There _you_ were, and I was so…”

Ian’s losing the battle against his tears, his face etched with pain, and Mickey realizes that he’s crying too. He tastes the hot salty tears that come rolling down his face and onto his lips while Ian cries, “…I didn’t know what to say”.

He sniffs loudly, his breath hitching painfully as he continues, “Or where to start. And so I just thought oh fuck it, I’ll erase it. Just erase it all. But I couldn’t do that, because I refused to believe you were gone. That’s how I found you in the first place. I refused to believe you were gone. But looking at you now, you are gone…aren’t you”.

Mickey’s own breathing is labored now, his chest struggling to contain his emotions that come fucking pouring from his red eyes anyways while Ian stares at him, waiting for an answer, waiting for… anything.

“You…left…me” Mickey manages to get out from his closing throat, Ian’s face crumpling again at his words.

“I didn’t w-want to. I didn’t want to Mick. I was _fucking scared._ I was scared and I didn’t know what to do, so I ran. Like I always did. I went home and I tried to fucking pretend for a year, pretend like I could be happy with someone else. Like it didn’t kill me doing that. But every fucking night it was the same, I’d dream about your face when I left you there, the look in your eyes, and I couldn’t fucking take it. I’ve been looking for you ever since, but you weren’t anywhere. You were just…gone”.

Mickey’s nose is running now too along with his eyes, and he wipes it against his arm with a loud sniff, refusing to look at him.

“I was always right here. Fucking waiting”, his voice cracks again, “For seven _years_ ”.

“I’m sorry” Ian finally whispers, his chest heaving, “I know that doesn’t mean anything… but…I’m so fucking sorry. I never stopped loving you. I’m _still_ in love with you”.

Mickey looks up the second his sentence ends, and the moment their eyes connect, they are reaching for each other, pulling each other close and pushing seven years of separation away as they hold each other tightly. Ian’s crying into his mouth as he kisses him, and he’s crying into his, but it doesn’t fucking matter, because he’s here.

He’s here, and he’s just said everything Mickey’s been waiting for seven years to hear.

-

Everyone always says the one who broke you can’t heal you. But it’s not fucking true, Mickey realizes. Pieces of his broken soul come back together that night while he’s in Ian’s loving arms, who’s promising to take him home, or stay here with him, whatever he wants.

“I can go home?” he asks slowly, trying to picture what that means.

Ian nods into his chest, trying to explain, “About a year and a half after I went back home, the case with Sammi was reopened. A neighbor finally came forward about seeing Debbie involved that night too. My…my family did everything they could to get her out of trouble, and our attorney eventually proved that you guys never meant to kill her. The only evidence they ever had was a witness saying you two put her in the crate, but after she willingly took a cocktail of drugs herself, and the defence argued it’s because you guys were scared that you would be blamed for her death. It’s not attempted murder if you believe the person is already dead. Debbie did a few months for concealing a crime, and you already served the sentence you would have been given for doing the same thing. You were exonerated by the next fall, but no one could ever find you to tell you that you could come back home”.

“And you came looking for me…every year?” Mickey asks, his voice thick and scratchy again. “Every year” Ian repeats quietly, “And it’s not just because you weren’t in trouble anymore. I know it probably looks that way. But I was never mentally in the relationship with T-“

“I don’t want to hear his name”.

“Okay. I was never mentally in a relationship with him. It was already falling apart, based on a lie, way before I even knew you would get off. He’s long gone Mickey, long gone”.

Mickey nods, but he wonders aloud, “Can we even _go home_ Ian? Can we even do this shit, live like we did before?”

Ian shakes his head slowly, reaching for his hand again. “Mick…not like it was before. I’m not gonna pretend like that’s possible. We’re almost thirty now. I don’t live on South Wallace anymore, I haven’t had a bipolar episode in months, and I’m not running from shit anymore. I have a house Mickey… a house. You can live there, with me. With my stupid cat. And we can…we can fix this. I know we can”.

After a long moment of silence, where Mickey feels Ian’s heart beating faster against his own while he waits for a response to his offer, he grins, knowing he’s right. It won’t be easy, it’ll take time, but they can fix it.

“A cat huh?”

**Author's Note:**

> Two pieces of writing here are not my own, so I want to give proper credit. Neither one was written about Gallavich/Shameless, but they fit their story perfectly. The initial dream sequence was written by @yourhandwritten letter on IG, and the speech by Ian is from an unknown film, but @mikhailovich posted on Twitter about Ian going to see Mickey in Mexico and saying everything from the clip. Which inspired this epilogue, so credit to her. Both pieces of writing were changed/edited slightly.


End file.
